Recently, distributed computing environments have been employed to maintain collections of data. Multiple computing nodes, potentially distributed across various geographic regions and data centers, may be employed to collectively provide applications with an efficient mechanism for storing and retrieving data.
Access to the data maintained in a distributed system may be described and regulated through schemas. A schema may describe the structure of data stored in the distributed system, including various elements that may pertain to a collection of data, such as tables, views, columns, data types, constraints, and so forth. However, certain issues may be associated with changes to the schema. For example, client applications may need to continue to operate even as the schema used by the collection of data evolves.